1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to an improved object location means for robot vision and optical systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Applications for industrial robots are presently restricted to simple repetitive tasks on production and assembly lines where components are delivered to the robot station under tightly controlled conditions. The principle reason for their limitation to such roles is the lack of an efficient and economical general technique to provide them with vision. Considerable effort is now being made in all technologically advanced countries to provide a suitable robot vision system. The commercial implications of a satisfactory system are very considerable and could initiate a new major industry.
To date the only successful attempts at industrial or robot vision systems have been restricted to very simple application systems to locate and orient components on some form of conveyor belt. This type of situation is comparatively easy to handle since the system is tightly constrained to a well regulated two-dimensional object field. Nonetheless, the logic systems required by contemporary designs, even for this simple case, usually need at least a powerful minicomputer.
The more general case of locating and recognizing objects in full three-dimensional space has not yet been solved. All present systems are highly experimental and invariably use main frame or very high powered computers; even with this power, the problem of location cannot be properly solved. Many techniques using outlines, edge detection, shading assessment, color, visual flow fields and the like, have been tried individually and in combination, to reconstruct the three dimensional aspects of an object field seen by a television camera. The inevitable complexity of these techniques defies a good real-time solution even where the most powerful computers now available are used for the analysis.
The central problem in the general case is in the recovery of the "depth" information from the two-dimensional image collected by a conventional camera or image system. The prior art provides no general technique for unambiguous recovery of the information lost irretrievably in the 3D to 2D transformation. The present invention seeks to ameliorate this deficiency in the prior art vision systems.